Introduction
Aligned to our city’s refreshed community plan, the Belfast Agenda 2024-28, Belfast City Council draft Corporate Plan 2024-28 and the annual Corporate Delivery Plan 2024-25, our Performance Improvement Plan 2024-25 sets out a number of priority areas where we intend to deliver improvements for our residents and stakeholders across the city.
Under the Local Government Act (NI) 2014, we have a statutory duty to agree improvement objectives, publish an annual Improvement Plan and ensure that appropriate arrangements are in place to achieve them. This is referred to as our “Duty to Improve”.
In accordance with the Act and accompanying guidance, for us “improvement” is about enhancing the sustainable quality of life and environment for ratepayers and communities rather than limited to gains in service output or efficiencies.
This year, the refreshed Belfast Agenda, the development of the draft Corporate Plan 2024-28 and the production of this plan coincided. This allowed us to align priorities and reinforce the link between them, providing a clear narrative and focus for all council improvement based on the areas where you think we could do better.
Our medium and longer-term arrangements to ensure continuous improvement are outlined in Figure 1. This plan sets out our performance improvement objectives for 2024 – 25 which are compliant with the requirement for them to be:
- legitimate - making a demonstrable contribution to at least one (or, probably, more than one) of the aspects of improvement listed in the Local Government Act.
- clear - setting out the visible improvement that citizens can expect.
- robust - with defined terms of success (whether quantitative or qualitative).
- deliverable - with established links to individual service programmes and budgets.
- demonstrable - capable of being supported by objective (but not necessarily measured or quantitative) evidence.
